On Wednesday, February 16, 2000 9:43 AM, Helen Beetham
[SMTP:H.Beetham@plymouth.ac.uk] wrote:
> Paul wrote:
>
> In this sense, I think the pressures for the commodification of the
> educational process (of which testing is an example) can be pretty
strongly
> linked to the systemic requirements of the global capitalist system as
> mediated through national educational policy.
Helen,
I think your post really hits the nail on the head. 'Lifelong learning' is
largely justified by the 'fact' that there are no longer jobs for life and
that we all need to remodel ourselves several times in our working lives to
remain employable. I'll have a look at your earlier paper.
I recently wrote something about the international 'reform agenda' for
higher education being pushed by the World Bank, Rand Institute and others.
(The full text is at: http://www.workersliberty.org/wlmags/wl61/bruce.htm).
There are two connected prongs to it both of which relate to your emphasis
on individualism. The first shifts the costs of HE from state to
individuals with an increased role for business sponsorship and
'philanthropy' - to use their terms transforming HE from being a 'public
good' to a 'private good'. Of course, when it is a private good,
individuals become more functionally concerned with what education can do
for career prospects as they need to get a 'return on their investment'.
The second being a 'diversification', which means an increasingly
differentiated set of institutions ranging from elite research universities
(who will train the professions and become the only places where it will be
possible to study certain 'non-useful' subjects) down to barely disguised
functional short vocational courses with content determined by industry.
Here are some extracts from what I wrote.
Bruce Robinson (still grappling with Ilyenkov!)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------
As this decline in state spending is seen as irreversible, and is indeed
welcomed by the World Bank, HE is seen as ripe for market solutions:
"The reform agenda of the 90s, and almost certainly extending well into the
next century, is oriented to the market rather than to public ownership or
to governmental planning and regulation. Underlying the market orientation
of tertiary education is the ascendance, almost world-wide, of market
capitalism and the principles of neo-liberal economics." [...]
By a private good, they mean that the benefits of education accrue to
individuals, rather than society as a whole and the costs should therefore
be borne by individuals who can seek out the best deal they can afford in
the market. (There is apparently a US website where university places are
auctioned!) At the same time, universities should be given more autonomy to
act as market-led institutions. Accordingly, the role of government shrinks
to tinkering with those aspects that the market cannot provide, such as
equity, with the result that "as universities and higher education systems
pay more attention to e.g., good personnel practices, cash flow, market
position, product diversification, and accountability, they will look more
'private' than the stereotype of 'public,' even if they remain state owned,
substantially tax-supported, and avowedly 'public' in their mission."[...]
'Diversification' is, according to the World Bank, "a strategy whereby the
social demand for higher education is managed through the development of a
variety of lower cost alternative institutions differentiated in terms of
missions, function and modes of delivery..." In other words, there will be
an increasingly large number of varieties of higher education ranging from
expensive, traditional and increasingly semi-privatised elite education
producing members of professions and researchers, through occupationally
oriented courses for producing, say, teachers, to mass, cheap and
skills-oriented courses used to supply industry with the types of people it
requires.
Consequently, RAND thinks it may be necessary to abolish "the traditional
sharp distinction between the bachelor's degree and all other non-degree
categories", replacing it with "the attainment of more specific, measurable
knowledge sets." Thus there has already been talk of two year degrees in
more vocationally focussed subjects in the UK. Alongside this universities
will come to differ more and more in terms of function - for example, not
all will be funded to do research.
Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark sums it up ['If it's so important, why won't they
pay for it?', Monthly Review, October 1999]:
"Through so-called mission differentiation, the restructuring will both
further advance the class stratification of higher education and
rationalize and economize on the processes whereby workers are sorted into
their 'appropriate' places in the educational and employment hierarchies."
While the UK has not yet embraced this strategy as wholeheartedly as the
US, nearly all the prerequisites for it to do so are in place. In 1992,
the undergraduate population trebled from 300,000 to just under a million
without any increase in the resources to support it. Since then, in England
funding has fallen a further 18% in real terms, so that there has been an
about 40% fall in the last 20 years. Mass entry to HE has been achieved on
the cheap, and accordingly a worse education is on offer to those who take
it up.
At the same time, the Russell Group, representing the top dozen elite
research universities (e.g. Oxbridge, LSE, Imperial College, Manchester,
UCL) are pushing for 'diversification', both by claiming a much larger
share of research funding, which would lead de facto to a division into
research and teaching only universities, and also by pushing for the right
to charge 'top-up' fees, which means being allowed to charge what the
'market' will bear. Most of these universities are already, according to
recent official figures, the most socially exclusive with around 5% of
students taken from 'low participation' (i.e. poorer) neighbourhoods and
with fewer mature students. Oxford still takes less than 50% of
undergraduates from state schools. If these institutions are allowed to set
their own levels of tuition fees, the higher costs will mean even fewer
working class students entering top universities unless, of course, they
benefit from the 'philanthropy' of scholarships as they had to do in the
days before student grants. [...]
Oblinger [an academic working for IBM] argues that students should be
taught "to understand the unwritten rules of the corporate culture" as
employers, says Oblinger, want employees "who can adapt to the
organisation, understand the job requirements, and produce work that has a
clear return - as quickly as possible. Adding value, especially in the
short term, relies on knowledge, speed of learning, ability to work in
teams, and adjusting to the culture of the organisation." Instead, "new
hires have little understanding of the role of the corporation".
Oblinger explicitly advocates shifting the burden of training costs and
courses from employers to colleges, one consequence of which must be the
shedding of those subjects and people that are not 'efficient' in terms of
producing what industry needs. "Liberal arts faculty, who often have little
contact with business personnel, are inclined to insist that job
preparation is not their concern... Many representatives of this group are
openly hostile to business". Never mind any notion of academic freedom.
These people had better shape up or their funding will wither away.
My personal experience of teaching for four years in a university institute
set up in the Thatcher years to meet skill shortages in information
technology and build 'business-university partnerships' suggests that this
process has already gone some way in Britain and that there are a lot of
Oblingers about. Business representatives on course committees (and
managers on part time courses) displayed a contempt for academics as being
out of touch with 'the real world' of business and for course content that
did not meet labour market imperatives or provide marketable skills. Thus a
dislike for anything requiring critical thought or analysis went with a
narrow utilitarian concern for the needs of industry in a way that is
probably typical of the outlook that will come to dominate if the 'reform'
agenda goes ahead.
>
> In the UK there is currently a major government effort aimed at
> making all of us 'lifelong learners', which has a particular
> resonance for Higher, Further and Continuing Education. Below
> is a copy of a posting I made yesterday to a UK educational
> development list which is discussing what it actually means
> to be a 'lifelong learner'. So far the discussion has focused
> on metacognitive skills and 'learner responsibility' - for
> anyone interested this gives a flavour of the current UK agenda.
>
> The Government Green Paper referred to, which is an abject lesson
> in what Paul describes above, can be found at
> http://www.lifelonglearning.co.uk/greenpaper/index.htm. The Dearing
> report was a major 1997 report into the current state of Higher
> Ed in the UK. FOFO, for the uninitiated, is shorthand for the new
> 'learner responsibility' ethos and stands for 'Fuck off and
> find out'.
>
> Helen
>
> ----------------------------------------
> I think like many agendas of the current government there are two
> forces at work here which it might be interesting to distinguish:
> on the one hand the communitarian impulse and on the other hand
> the impulse towards individualism and consumerism.
>
> At its best the lifelong learning agenda seems to be about participatory
> citizenship. 'Education, education, education'
> is the solution to all our collective unhappinesses: unemployment,
> the loss of family and community values, even old age (see paragraph 8
> of The Learning Age if you don't believe me). Dearing wanted Higher
> Ed. to be about providing 'leaders' in the new knowledge society, by
> which I take it he meant not just economic leaders but also good
citizens,
> helping their local community centre connect to the Internet and cyber-
> canvassing for their local labour party before the 2008 general
elections.
>
> On the other hand once you get beyond the introductions of these shiny
> government documents there is a lot less emancipation of the creative
> intellect and a lot more 'having the skills needed by employers' (Green
> Paper on Lifelong Learning para 6). The learning agenda of lifelong
> learning is very clearly about making *employees* responsible for their
> own learning - in other words not only had you better equip yourself
> with the skills employers need today, but you'd better be ready for the
> next take-over/economic melt-down/technical revolution tomorrow.
>
> From the groves of academe we can rationalise this -
> we talk about learning skills, meta-cognition and equipping students for
> endless change in a supercomplex society. All this matters to the
individual
> student. But at the end of the day, isn't all this talk about individual
> responsibility just a little bit ... Thatcherite? What about the fact
that
> students come to us with very different experiences and sometimes very
> little
> cultural capital to invest in making sense of the 'opportunities' we
present
> to
> them? Where are the critical skills and what Ron Barnet calls 'critical
> being'?
> What about the fact that *some* of our students might not actually want
to
> work
> for one of the top 10 graduate employers but write poetry/get buried at
> Newbury bypass/become the next labour PM/change the world?
>
> In HE, at worst, we have the fofo approach which means more
> time for research and never mind those tedious educational interactions.
> But from outside academia the learner-driven model can be even more
> insidious.
> If people don't take advantage of the opportunities that are now (thanks
to
> the
> Internet) all around them, surely that's their fault! The uneducated
> will by definition be undeserving.
>
> It's the change from a 'push' model of education - fill'em up with it in
the
> early
> part of their lives - to a 'pull' model - give it'em when they ask for
it.
> Of course those who lack the cultural capital to ask for it, or ask in
the
> right way, or make sense of 'it' when they get it, are going to lose out.
> The 'push'
> model was all wrong too. But when David Blunkett's foreword to The
> Learning Age mentions 'human capital' twice in the first seven lines... I
> tend to think lifelong learning must be capitalism with a human face.
>
> Sorry for the rant. I'll get back in my box now!
>
> (An earlier but more considered response I wrote to the Lifelong Learning
> Green paper is at
> http://www.cti.ac.uk/links/lifelong/lllresp.html)
>
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